Preface This article has been spawned from a thread on the Ars boards about the EMusic service, and more so from the feedback I have been hearing about the not-so unlimited “unlimited” service. Being a person that hates virtually everything RIAA stood for, I found myself at an awkward position of defending the service, owned by Vivendi, a RIAA partner. The service For $9.95 a month, EMusic allows you to gain unlimited access to their music library. For its 70,000 registered users and the plethora of potential consumers that want to pay a reasonable price for downloadable music, this is a...

Preface “Damn you. Damn you all to Hell!” This seems to be the stance of RIAA and MPAA now that they won some legal battles over the recent months. It seems every day passes, the RIAA and the MPAA want to put more of a stranglehold on all types of file sharing networks. Decentralized = RIAA/MPAA scared s***less Ah the Gnutella network, what a wonderful creation. Originally coded by some AOL/Nullsoft programmers, the Gnutella network is a system of decentralized file sharing comuters that come together to share ANY type of file. But naturally the RIAA and the MPAA feel threatened by the free...

The following is an article from Eric Boehlert, a senior writer at Salon and I have been granted permission to publish the article in it’s entirety. If you have to pay $10,000 to shut your boss up, goddamn it, you pay. — A major-label executive For an industry that has been bedeviled by federal investigations in recent years, the music business would seem like an unlikely one to call for serious governmental overview. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. Concerned about the pervasive and costly pay-for-play independent-promotion system that has become entrenched at commercial...